1: Amy, a millennial, had just graduated from college. She was hired as a telesales representative at a software firm.
Amy took the job, knowing it wasn’t a “career job.” But she needed to pay her rent, Fred Kofman writes in The Meaning Revolution.
“Her job was to cold-call people who had previously used the company’s software to sell them a new product,” Fred writes.
Her compensation? $20 per hour plus bonuses for meeting or surpassing her quota.
Her new firm didn’t tell Amy the point of her work other than to sell more of the company’s product—which she had never used.
“She only knew that if she met her sales quota, she’d get a reward, and if she failed to reach it two months in a row, she’d get fired,” Fred writes.
“My manager never praised me, only criticized me,” Amy remembers. “I never seemed to do anything right. I was stressed out all the time. I didn’t have the tools I needed to do my work well. And I didn’t want to ask, as I saw that when any of my teammates asked for help they’d get in trouble. I just put my head down and did whatever I had to do.”
How did she feel? “I hated my job, my boss, my coworkers; and after a while, I began to hate myself.”
So she quit.
2: The good news? Amy found a new position “where she feels totally engaged,” Fred writes. “She now works at an organization that connects people from the same neighborhood online.
“She believes that this organization is committed to achieving something good in the world,” he notes. “She feels grateful to participate in a noble purpose in the company of people who support her. She understands how her efforts fit into the big organizational picture, and she knows that her work touches lives for the better.”
And that’s not all. She understands what is expected of her and is trusted to deliver without micromanaging.
The best part? “She knows her manager is there to support her and to help her grow,” Fred writes. “The manager is always available and often asks Amy if she needs any tools, materials, or training to do her job better every day. Periodically, he’ll engage her in a career conversation, encouraging her to plot a course that makes the best use of her talents and passions.”
3: 94 percent of millennials want to use their skills to do good in the world, a 2014 study of three hundred companies showed.
More than 50 percent would be willing to be paid less than their current salary to do work that matches their values.
“Amy feels that she is part of an extraordinarily high-performance team, where everybody is committed to doing a quality job,” Fred observes.
“She’s proud of what she does, how she does it, what she does it for, and with whom she does it. Changing jobs,” he writes, “is not even a remote consideration in her mind; she wants to rise in the organization to help it thrive.”
Yesterday, we looked at how companies with highly engaged team members are metaphorically picking up $1,000 bills on the sidewalk.
Amy is a case study of what it means to be motivated by intrinsic rewards, the drive to do something because we enjoy it, rather than extrinsic rewards, where we do something to receive a reward or avoid punishment.
“Forty years of psychological and economic research proves that adding financial incentives to situations in which people are motivated to work hard and well without them seems to undermine rather than enhance the motives people already have,” says psychologist Barry Schwartz.
“Extrinsic motivation, such as the pursuit of money, undermines intrinsic motivation,” he says.
Fred advises leaders: “See through the illusion that extrinsic rewards are what employees care about most.”
Because: “The more a company uses material rewards and punishments to drive behavior, the less people will invest their discretionary and internally motivated effort.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Does my organization seek to motivate team members primarily by intrinsic or extrinsic rewards?
Action: Discuss with my team or with a colleague.